Interpretation
Change Package: Interpretation
Impact on Teaching
After engaging in comprehension work, a coherent arc of text-based lessons often take students into analytic and then interpretive work. Genuine interpretive tasks invite students to work from text evidence to respond to ambiguities and authentic questions about a text's ideas that the reader is left with after reading. These questions require the reader to have a firm understanding of the ideas in the text or set of texts under study and should come after students have had a few opportunities to use talk and writing to clarify their thinking about what's going on in a text.
How do you plan an interpretive task?
Planning
Review the text (or pair of texts) that students will be working with. As you review the text, notice where you've marked the text for
your own uncertainty - these are places in a text where you are left with questions about content and big ideas that are not resolved in a second read.
complexities or contridictions - these might be places where, in fiction, a tangeled web of events leaves you guessing at a character's motivations or, in non-fiction, places where an author might support an argument or an idea with what seems like an odd piece of evidence that needs to be interpreted.
Good interpretive questions lend themselves to multiple responses that can be supported with evidence from the text. Not every text you read will lead itself to good (and genuine) interpretive work. The Great Books Foundation (2007) suggests that interpretive questions have the following characteristics:
Express genuine doubt and curiostiy.
Relate to the specific text under discussion. If the question can be asked, with minor changes, about another text, then it is probably too general.
Use simple and direct langauge. The question should be understandable to others.
Once you've decided on your analysis question, create a student-centered task sheets that:
Help students understand the purpose for the work that they will be doing
Lay out the steps in the task
Provide some insight into how to complete new activities or skills, such as providing tips for completing a quick write if that is new for students, or what it means to compose a write-like.